Frugal-one, I'm so sorry you went through that and so glad you thought to call the hospital--you did what he would have wanted, and it is so hard.
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Frugal-one, I'm so sorry you went through that and so glad you thought to call the hospital--you did what he would have wanted, and it is so hard.
Frugal one, sorry to hear of your problems. I've had a similar dilemma as power of attorney and the objections of others for my choices. It still haunts me a little, but no regrets. Your brother gave you power of attorney because he valued your judgement over others. You did the right thing.
Frugal-one, thank you for doing this difficult task and doing what your brother would have wanted you to do.
Family situations like this can be so traumatic unnecessarily. I am sorry for your pain. You did what your brother wanted.
I am so sorry, frugal-one. What a position to be put in, but you did the right thing.
Thank you for your kind words and listening.
My spouse's penchant for over-using things like aluminum foil drives me crazy. All of this was used to reheat 1/2 a breakfast burrito.
Attachment 6192
I literally fish it out of the garbage when he is done and put it in my aluminum drink can bin to take into the scrap metal dealer to redeem for cash.
I sometimes buy pies that come with the tins, like Mrs. Callender chocolate, and then keep the tins and use them for things like reheating food or freezing dinners in batches. Some are slightly smaller in diameter and he could put the larger on the bottom and the smaller atop and reheat the burrito that way.
That would be something I would do but my spouse does not have a frugal bone in his body. Sometimes it astounds me that we are even a match but as the old cliche says, opposites attract.
It can get frustrating. Lately I have been sucked into the world of YouTube and because I watched one person doing their "frugal tips", the algorythm gives me everybody and their mother doling out frugal advice. It's kind of interesting for a while because it helps me get back into it but it is very different from when I was single and could do whatever I wanted. Trying to be really frugal when the spouse isn't really on board and a spouse who makes a lot of money is pretty hard. I think if he got laid off, or when he retires it will be a lot easier to get him in to it. But I drop hints here and there - this month I have been tracking how much we spend on his fizzy drinks. The month isn't even over and he's already spent $67. I guess the good thing here is that he doesn't drink alcohol but still, I cannot believe how much he spends on sodas and Bubly water! At the rate we are going, it'll be more like $80 at the end of the month and then times twelve months is a whopping $960 a year on fizzy stuff. He has NO IDEA because he just doesn't think in those terms like I do!
I have always thought it would be difficult to pair up at an older age. We are all pretty set in our ways about certain things. A woman I know (in her 70s) just got a new live-in boyfriend and he is hauling all his stuff over little by little. She complains a lot about his overabundance of stuff and where to put it all.
In my 70’s I would like my live in boyfriend (fat chance that would ever happen) to live in——-next door to me..
yes, an apartment or duplex unit would fit the bill. Neat, tidy boundaries formed by actual walls.
Is there not a way to have that happen??Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
I understand about the neatness factor when two people greatly diverge...I close my eye's when I enter my spouse's office...but the chaos pretty much stays there so it's his domain to have as he sees fit (but it does give me fits..lol).
I am really tired of scheduling, re scheduling, and re re scheduling meetings around our intermittent snows.
Reaaaaallllly tired of it!
Next year I will tell my groups there will be no meetings in January and February to pre empt that problem.
Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
Just schedule them in Hawaii or somewhere nice and warm.:idea:
don’t I wish!Quote:
Originally Posted by ToomuchStuff
IL, I am always wary in the winter of scheduling anything "permanant and no n refundable.
I am mourning the loss of JoAnn’s Fabric stores across the country. The first report was at certain stores would close and then included the store nearest me, but the store I use in the city of St. Louis would remain open. Then today someone else said no all the stores are closing.
I am truly bummed and even shocked because I don’t know where I’m going to get fabric. Granted, I do sometimes buy fabric online, but that’s not the same as going into a store and seeing large swaths of it displayed.
I am bummed and heartbroken. My tiny town has two fabric stores, but they are for quilters, you know quilting fabric. It’s all that tightly woven small print cotton fabric. That fabric is very nice, but I need more variety.
I agree!! We have a JoAnn's in Burlington, and I shop there fairly regularly. It is really a vestige of the past, though, when people actually made stuff. I went to JoAnn's a lot when I was making my DD's wedding dress, but I frequently found a reason to go for other things.Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
I also don't know what will replace them. Fabric, by definition, is tactile. It's really difficult to purchase fabric online. I don't even know where people buy fabric, if it's not JoAnn's.
I'll mourn with you, IL.
hobby lobby, and Michael’s craft stores have a small fabric section, but it is small.Quote:
Originally Posted by catherine
I never minded the rows and rows of cotton quilting fabrics at JoAnn’s because I figured the quilters were keeping the place goingeven though I walked right past those bolts to look for things I needed. and the ribbon section!
The tariff whiplash continues. Unknown if the 25% on Canada/Mexico is will go into effect at the beginning of the month.
If any of you find yourself in my neck of the woods, Zimman's in Lynn is highly regarded:Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
https://www.zimmans.com/products-and-services/fabrics
True. I guess the diehards can also travel to 7th Ave in NYC.Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
Do you still sew garments, Iris? Or what do you generally buy fabric for?
I never sew garments. It is all household sewing for me: pillows, window treatments, bedding items, Napkins, table coverings, and a few craft things like doll clothes and flower show backdrops.Quote:
Originally Posted by KayLR
I'm pretty much the same way, and honestly, I really haven't been finding much I want or need from Joann for quite some time. For instance, I was looking for real gingham a few years ago and could only find cheapo printed gingham rather than real woven gingham there or at the local craft place. (I was taking a class on Chicken Scratch).Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
I ended up ordering from Etsy. I purchase a good deal of supplies from that site. I also could only find batiste there.
ETA: I also find good fabrics at our thrift shops.
The last few times I went to a Joann's, their stores were a chaotic mess. We have a 60 yr old fabric store here (one half of it is quilt fabric) that until recently was a time capsule full of musty 1980s upholstery fabric. It has recently been purchased and is slowly being cleaned up. For decor projects, I have good luck with Spoonflower. The quality of their fabric is great so far and shipping is quick.
As part of keeping my job, I have to go to continuing ed type seminars, and lately they have all been about AI and how we should use it more. That is upsetting enough, but in yesterday's seminar, the guy started telling us that we all should be very polite when interacting with AI, that we will get better results if we are polite to it. (I am not making this up.) All I could think of was we were being told to be polite to our eventual overlords, to keep any resistance to its use out of its cumulative "memory" or whatever it has. The worst part was that I navigated away from the screen because I was so irritated, and then it locked me out of the meeting, so I don't know if I will even get the credit for sitting through that drivel.
yikes,Tybee, that would be annoying. I Was exasperated with ChatGPT when I queried some simple facts about the current president of the United States, as I detailed here, and was rude to chatGPT. But really I was not using ChatGPT appropriately. The questions I asked were more appropriate for Google, just simple factual questions. I guess I should use ChatGPT to synthesize information across the Internet and present a coherent response in multiple paragraphs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tybee
how do they want you to use ChatGPT more often?
They actually don't want us using ChatGPT, but rather Microsoft CoPilot because it will "forget" what you feed into it if you have a paid subscription. ChatGPT will "steal" anything you put in it, which is problematic from the standpoint of FERPA.Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
They have rewritten curriculum so that now in my comp class, for example, they are encouraged to learn to use AI "responsibly." All three of the major assignments have AI components. So now to make room for all that AI, there is much less on grammar and citation, which they desperately need. Students even tell me that in the last week's feedback, that they want less AI and more of the traditional curriculum. And for students to ask for more grammar, you know it's bad.
The push is also for us to start using AI to grade. They are very gingerly about this as they know it will get our backs up, but that was yesterday's seminar, on how to program AI to write your feedback to students for you, to make you more "efficient." I am getting sick to my stomach just writing that out.
The big push is to make it so you aren't really teaching, but AI is teaching and you are pulling all the levers and setting up the AI so that you can handle more classes, more students, at the same salary, and they have to hire fewer faculty, and finally AI is "teaching" the class. At least that is my admittedly pessimistic viewpoint. It's the same as firing the fed workers and replacing them with AI, the same thing Catherine has referenced about what is going on with the techno rulers.
Anyway, I am starting to feel like I am working in the Matrix.
Oh tybee, I feel for you. It is NOT a good thing. But it is certainly the way those in charge seem to think. No respect for teachers or education. I'm glad I retired. Good luck with keeping your sanity.
I have an open mind towards AI in my field. I've already used it for instant interview transcripts that would otherwise take me 3 hours to type, or cost $150 to have someone do it for me. Plus, a little perk you get with the transcription is a summary of the interview. I don't cut and paste that and send it to the client, but I do it to gut-check myself, or to get an idea of a basic outline structure for what I will eventually write myself.
At the conference I was at last week, they stressed the fact that it's simply a tool, like letterpress was a tool to create reproducible newspapers. They used the example of a brainstorming session where we all tried to come up with sweet treats that would go well with tea. Each of the pairs of teams in the room came up with 7-10 ideas in 3 minutes. Then we asked ChapGPT and we got 25 ideas in 10 seconds, and there were expected as well as very unusual ones. In a real brainstorming session, you would use that list as a springboard for your own ideas. In my case, I rejected most of my AI ideas and felt even more confident in my own. But they were decent ideas.
Oh, and I always say "please" and "thank you"
Thank you. I am trying.Quote:
Originally Posted by nswef
Sounds like it is working great for you.Quote:
Originally Posted by catherine
One of the things that bothers me about using AI for feedback with students is that I would be feeding their work into it, and they have not consented to that--I don't feel this respect their privacy, their data. So that would give me pause, using it on their work.
I can understand that.... I should ask my cybersecurity expert DIL what she thinks about that... I've never met anyone more concerned about privacy and personal security than she is, and she uses AI all the time--but for her own work--not the work of others.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tybee
One question I would ask is are you feeding it patient interviews? Have they consented to their data going into AI?
With feeding information into AI, I think about Tybee’s students. Anything they write is owned by them via copyright laws. The copyright doesn’t have to be registered for them to own the content.
What a thorny world digital dominance has opened up.
They do consent, prior to interviews, for us to record the session. The recordings are deidentified, and so that means the transcripts are, too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tybee
According to what I learned at yesterday's session, if you pay for Microsoft CoPilot it will "forget" the data, clear it, but ChatGPT does not, it incorporates it into its learning. So if the product you are getting is proprietary to you or the organization you are doing it for, that's one thing to consider. Our institution tells us we are no longer allowed to use ChatGPT for this reason and we can only use the licensed Microsoft CoPilot.Quote:
Originally Posted by catherine
Interesting conversation. I'm not sure I use AI at all... at this point in time. I don't use Siri, Google, or any of the other existing "ask me a question" devices. How does one actually connect to ChatGPT? If it is through one of those "free-standing" devices - don't have one. LOL.
(And I'm usually fine with technology, just not the extra stuff that - at this point - just doesn't fit into my life or lifestyle. Maybe down the road... who knows.)